Alan Johnson is the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre.

Nicolas Anelka, the 'quenelle' and the history of demonising Jews

When he was first challenged about his stiff-arm "quenelle" salute, Nicolas Anelka claimed the quenelle was an "anti-establishment" not an anti-Semitic gesture.

The West Brom footballer almost certainly does not realise it, but the quenelle is part of a long disastrous tradition that demonises the Jews (later Israel) while imagining that by doing so it is striking a blow against an "establishment". The ugly phenomenon was called the "socialism of fools"’ in the 19th century, became the "anti-imperialism of fools"’ in the 20th century, and is today – complete with selfies and You Tube videos – what you might call the anti-establishmentism of fools.

The tradition got going during the foundations of the socialist movement in the late 19th century when some on the Left, often as a tactical ploy, replaced class struggle with anti-Jewish struggle. They identified "The Jew" with finance capitalism. August Bebel, the German Social Democrat leader, shook his head at all this, laughed at the "socialism of fools" and fought it.

And there was so much of it to fight. The anarchist Bakunin wrote: "The whole Jewish world constitutes one exploiting sect, one people of leeches". In 1883, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) leader Hyndmanapplauded popular anti-Semitism in Austria on the grounds that "the attack upon Jews is a convenient cover for a more direct attack upon the great landlords and Christian capitalists". In 1891, the Labour Leader, organ of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), claimed that "wherever there is trouble in Europe, wherever rumours of war circulate and men's minds are distraught with fear of change and calamity, you may be sure that a hooked-nosed Rothschild is at his games somewhere near the region of the disturbances". Ruth Fischer, a leading figure in the German Communist Party in the early 1920s, wrote "Whoever fights against Jewish capital … is already a class-fighter, even if he does not know it … Strike down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp posts, crush them!"

The sickness on the Left went deeper than individuals.

Two ideas that were very popular on the Left, assimilationism and universalism, both admirable in many ways, took on a darker meaning when it came to the Jews.

In the 19th century, most of the Left felt that assimilation was the only acceptable Jewish response to modernity and anti-Semitism. It disapproved of the survival of Jewishness – of the Jews as a people with the right to national self determination as opposed to individuals with civil rights. Instead, the Left hoped to dissolve Jewish peoplehood in the solvent of progressive universalism. The proletariat, understood as the universalist class par excellence, was to make a revolution that would solve "the Jewish question" once and for all. Actually, in the 19th century and the early 20th century, many European Jews agreed with both universalism and assimilation; it was the name of their desire too.

But world history went another way and Jewish history went with it. The failure of the European socialist revolution, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, and the unprecedented transformation of the assault upon the Jews – in the form of the Shoah, an industrial-scale genocide in the heart of Europe – left the appeal of assimilationism and universalism in tatters. In response, the Jews insisted on defining their own mode of participation in universal emancipation: Zionism and support for the creation of the state of Israel. Whether they moved to Israel or not, that was the choice of all but a slither of world Jewry. And that remains the case today.

Crucially, large parts of the Left – by no means all – failed to adapt to this great rupture in world history, and that failure has had profound consequences for the relationship between the left and the Jews. Sticking to its comprehensive hostility in principle to Zionism, the Left has become comprehensive hostile in practice to the Jews.

Two post-war events made all this worse.

First, Stalinism spread over large parts of the globe after World War Two. The roots of contemporary Left-wing anti-Semitism can be traced to its malign influence. The 1952 Slansky show trial, when most of the Jewish Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party were shot, was typical. They were charged with being rootless cosmopolitans, and part of a general global conspiracy. As the Soviet Union could not use the old language of anti-semitism, they called the condemned "Zionists". Of course, the term meant "Jew".

Second, there was the take-over of the Left by "anti-imperialism". It used to be one value among many, balanced against democracy, liberty, women’s equality, sexual freedom, anti-totalitarianism. Not anymore. As David Hirsh, an academic expert on Left-wing anti-Semitism puts it, anti-imperialism became "the central value, prior to and above all others".

Israel has been reframed by this Left as a "key site of the imperialist system" and "Zionism" began, slowly but surely, to take on the old shapes that had been reserved for "the Jew". (Only you had to remember to call them "Zionists".)

The consequences beggared belief. For example, in 1976 two German far-Leftists Wilfried Böse and Brigitte Kuhlmann hijacked Air France Flight 139 along with their comrades Fayez Abdul-Rahim Jaber and Jayel Naji al-Arjam, and demanded the release of Palestinian and Baader-Meinhof terrorists. They flew the plane to Entebbe in Uganda, separated the Jews from the non-Jews, and prepared to execute them

Let’s give it a name – reactionary anti-imperialism has beeneating away at the Left like a cancer since the 1960s.

If 19th-century universalism and assimilationism gave the socialist Left a predisposition to be hostile to the Jews as a people, the 20th-century accretions of Stalinist "anti-Zionism" and reactionary anti-imperialism gave the left a predisposition to be comprehensively hostile to "Zionists" – i.e. almost all world Jewry – and to view Israel as a state beyond the pale.

Which brings us back to Nicolas Anelka and his stiff arm. Anti-Semitism passing itself off as anti-establishmentism – here is the "socialism of fools" of the 21st century.